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Category: perspective

Long Distance

Long Distance

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My vocation demands close work; I seldom have the
opportunity to look at the horizon. Here I’ve done little else. Whether it’s wondering
if it’s a ship I see on the last curve beyond the furthermost whitecap of the
Atlantic Ocean or looking for an egret across vast tracts of swamp, one way or the other I’m casting my eyes to the faintest, most faraway speck I can see.  
Surely this must be good for one’s eyes — to say nothing of one’s soul.
Long distance — what the eagle spots from his perch on the
highest dead tree in the refuge. 
Long distance — what the birder tries to obliterate
with his binoculars.  
Long-distance vision — what
the pilgrim hopes to bring back from the shore.
Cloud Post

Cloud Post

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Though I’m sitting at a desk staring at a screen, in my mind’s eye I’m surveying clouds. I’m lying on a deck chair, as I did on Saturday. My hands are laced behind my head, and I’m marveling at the puffy cumulus clouds that float across an impossibly blue sky.

Maybe I was just short on imagination that day, but I spied no particular shapes. No castles, dogs or sinister faces. I saw just the clouds themselves, and that was enough. I looked at them for what felt like hours but was only minutes. Still, it was long enough to get lost in their alabaster swirls, their tufted promises; to swim recklessly from one to the other across the fathomless blue.

The clouds were both companionable and regal. Looking at them long enough I wondered what it would be like to be a part of them. It would mean I’d be drenched, of course, but if by some miracle I could remain dry, and I could fly without fear to the outermost thin trails of cirrus, what would the green world look like underneath? How verdant? How insignificant? How much like home?

Photo: Weather report.com

Plane Spotting

Plane Spotting

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A walk yesterday along the George Washington Parkway path took me to Gravelly Point, just shy of National Airport. It’s where you go to see jets take off and land. I’ve heard of this place for years but never visited. September 11, 2011, made the sight of low-flying airplanes considerably less palatable for most of us. But once I  put those associations out of mind, it was hard not to be impressed with the power and the presence of the giant birds.

You hear them before you see them — the roar of their engines as they zoom in from the west. But more impressive even than the sound  is the surreal sight of them overhead, creatures of air approaching land. If you spot them when they’re still miles away, you see them dwarfing the Washington Monument, which has been lessened by distance to an insignificant obelisk.

But quicker than seems possible, they are above you, and (if you are an inexperienced amateur photographer with a slow-shooting camera) you’re trying hard to take the picture at just the right moment — when the plane is immediately overhead, blotting out the sky; when you, this puny earthbound human, are spellbound, filled with joy at the improbable sight.

Sometimes you catch it. And sometimes you don’t.

Framing the Sky

Framing the Sky

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Yesterday I looked up from page proofs long enough to notice how the hole in the sky left open when a large tree fell three years ago has grow a shaggy green border, enough to make a verdant frame for a patch of blue.

I stared at the “picture” inside that frame. It wasn’t a static one, of course, because high up in the canopy a faint breeze was stirring and white clouds bobbed across the blue, like so many duck targets at a state fair booth.  I watched long enough until I saw a hawk glide across the frame. At night I do the same thing with bats, sit in the gloaming and watch for them to dart through the air. They’re more visible when they cross our patch of sky.

It was a sad day when the great oak fell. But in the years since, I’ve grown fond of the space it left behind. Because of it, my eyes are more often drawn to the sky.

Above: a frame of a different sort. 

A Matter of Direction

A Matter of Direction

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This morning I enter the city from the east, the sun an orange disc behind me. Across a broad river and along a flat plain, the bus takes a route I don’t understand and scarcely notice.

For me, a car/Metro Orange Line/Metro Red Line commuter who enters and exits at least three vehicles before I walk into the office, this seems easy. Board a bus in one place, exit in another.

I think about approach and perspective, how the angle of light, the placement of shadows, can make such a difference.

I have arrived at the same destination from a different direction. And this has made an old place seem new again.

Castle in the Clouds

Castle in the Clouds

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I sit at a stoplight, one of several long ones I’ve already encountered on the way home. I’m running late and the light takes forever. I strum my fingers on the steering wheel, tap my feet, fiddle with the knobs of the radio and then fiddle with them some more. I look up, light’s still red. 

It’s then that I think that I have become Fairfax County. Its tempo is my tempo. Its impatience is my impatience.  I drive too close to the car in front of me as I listen too intently to public radio. I have come to believe that what I do every day is more important than it actually is.

What I need is a summer off. Humility Camp. In which people from the East Coast are sent to carefully chosen out-of-the-way burgs in the Heartland. Let us walk down empty sidewalks to the only store that sells the New York Times, only to find that there is no Times delivery today. The wireless in our rented two-bedroom will long since have fizzled. Our Kindle is out of charge.

There is nothing to do, then, but to lie back on the grass, look up at the sky and find a castle in the clouds.

Unendangered

Unendangered

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Of the three houses I lived in growing up, all had woods and fields nearby where I could ramble. These weren’t parks but undeveloped land, and about them hung an air of impermanence. The neighborhood I left to go to college was once known as Banana Hollow and had been known locally for its fine sledding hill. But the slope had long since fallen to the bulldozer.

I roamed the edges and bottomlands of this territory — just as I had the Ware farm which backed up to our previous house. That land, a plentiful pasture studded with the occasional giant oak, was home to a herd of grazing cattle. Some mornings I woke to the sound of their tramping and munching on the other side of our fence. But the Ware Farm was gone soon after we left that house, when I was a sophomore in high school.

All this is to say that when I hike through Folkstone Forest and the adjacent stream valley park, I am mindful of the gift, the certainty of this semi-natural land. Sure, in winter you might glimpse houses along its periphery, but plunge deep enough and all that’s visible is tree and fern and vine. It is stream valley land, prone to flooding and therefore protected.

I walk in an unendangered suburban wilderness. And I am grateful for that.

Right Back Where We Started From

Right Back Where We Started From

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Tom showed me a chart in the newspaper on New Year’s Eve, a chart that recorded the highs and lows, the improbable multiple dips and rises of the stock market in 2011. Funny thing was, it ended right where it began at the end of 2010.

There is cause for celebration in this. For the patient investor, obviously, who finds that — yes! — he still has a retirement fund. But for all of us who think we have fallen far when really we’re stuck in the same place.

I don’t like being stuck, stuck isn’t good. But it’s better than the alternative. So here’s a toast to all of us who, for whatever reason, find ourselves this year right where we were last year. We know what we have to do; now we just have to do it.

Post Irene

Post Irene

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The rain pounded and the winds roared but our trees remained upright and true. By mid Sunday morning, the sun was shining and the wind had blown in blue skies and puffy clouds. I took my camera for a walk and snapped photos of grasses blowing in the wind, late summer flowers nodding on their stalks and this one, of a pond near us.

It is an ordinary view made extraordinary by the quality of the air yesterday, pellucid and scrubbed clean. It was as if the true nature of the place was shining through.

I pass this pond several times a week, but now I will see, layered over its everyday clothes, this view — the pond decked out in its Sunday best.

Getting Out

Getting Out

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I hadn’t ridden Metro in 10 days and my first day back brought a delay. “This train is being off-loaded. Everyone out,” the conductor shouted. So we grabbed our bags and backpacks and joined the crush of other commuters on the platform.

It was dark and steamy. Passengers were not happy. It’s one thing to end your day with an off-load; starting it that way, when you’re morning crisp, is especially trying.

Then it dawned on me. Yes, it was already 80 at 7 a.m., but I was close enough to walk to the office. So I maneuvered my way down the platform and up the escalator to the outside world. The sidewalks were wide and the morning was bright. There was a faint breeze. I was out of the tunnel and could see far ahead.

Vacations, even short ones, show me the edges of things, reveal ways around obstacles. They help me see that I am not trapped.


Photo: PublicDomainPictures.net